The Internet has been expanding into a more mobile Internet by using radio cellular technologies. An Internet of Things (IoT) is what some people envision to connect billions of physical or virtual objects in the Internet cloud. This enables these objects to exchange information not only among themselves but with the environments and servers that provide services to benefit the devices and end users. Although this concept seems simple, there are significant challenges in wirelessly communicating with billions of objects.
Wireless mobile services have been mainly designed for human communications that include both human-to-human and human-to-server communications. Human communications utilize many devices, such as personal computers (PCs), notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, and such devices provide similar interfaces and services to users (e.g. video, voice, and multimedia). Such devices connected to a wireless network can be addressed individually. Specifically, wireless communication technologies are configured to provide an individual connection identifier for each service type that is provided on a device.
In contrast, the machine-to machine (M2M) communication market is highly fragmented, with different vertical sectors targeting services ranging from telemetry (e.g. smart meter, remote monitoring), telematics (e.g. fleet tracking), to surveillance video. These M2M services and similar types of services have very different specifications. For example, sending similar requests to a group of wireless devices may be desirable. In the example situation of a utility monitoring device, there may be a large group of wireless utility monitoring devices (e.g., 100-1000 devices) that may receive the same monitoring message from a server. This monitoring message can request a report from each device to collect the utility usage data from the utility monitoring devices. In this scenario, a duplicate monitoring message may be sent to each device. However, sending a separate monitoring message to each device individually can be slow and can increase the amount of traffic sent over a wireless network, especially as the number of mobile devices and M2M devices connected to wireless networks increases.
In some situations, the intended recipient device(s) is in idle mode to conserve power. As a result, the device(s) in idle mode are paged so that the device(s) can transition from idle mode to connected mode to receive the monitoring message. When a large number of devices transition from idle mode to connected mode, paging these devices individually can result in excessive signaling overhead.